Facebook to rethink the conception of political advertising

Facebook will rethink the principles of placing political advertising on its platform and may make some changes to the regulations before the mid-term elections to the US Congress scheduled for November 2018, said This Thursday, October 12, said Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer. "We are now actively working on all these things, the company pays much attention to improving all this," Reuters quotes his words.

Brian Solis

Implementing changes is not an easy process, Schroepfer stressed, because Facebook does not want to strangle legal advertising, and is also taking into account the amount of materials posted on the network, which has 2 billion users and 5 million advertisers. "We are actively investing in technical solutions, because we are working in unprecedented conditions," he said. According to Schroepfer, the company this month intends to hire more than 1,000 new employees to track advertisements and monitor their compliance with Facebook terms.

Media recently reported that Facebook, Twitter and Google have identified thousands of advertisements on their platforms that were placed during the presidential campaign in the US in 2016 by Russian agents. Among other things, the publications mentioned the well-known "troll factory" affiliated with the Kremlin. The reports led to a crisis in the Silicon Valley. On November 1, the leadership of American IT companies will testify before the Congressional committee investigating Moscow's interference in the presidential elections in the United States.

Meanwhile, the US House of Representatives Special Committee for Intelligence, which is investigating allegations of Moscow's interference in the US elections in 2016, intends to publish advertising materials that Facebook attributes to the Russian agents.

According to him, Mike Conaway (a Republican from Texas) and Adam Schiff (a Democrat from California) earlier in the day met with the operating director of the American Facebook company Cheryl Sandberg. Following the meeting, the lawmakers said they had reached an agreement to publish copies of these materials.

It is expected that in the special committee will hold hearings devoted to the attempts of Russia to interfere in the course of the pre-election campaign on November 1. Conaway clarified that the materials in question are unlikely to be published before. According to the legislator, he hopes that "it will happen as soon as possible." Schiff noted that there is no personal information to be published at this time.